A History of Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global Perspective

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Introduction

Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective Paul Ocobock

, , , beggars, bums, mendicants, idlers, indigents, itinerants, the underclass, and the homeless—all these names and legal categories seek to describe poor, unemployed, and highly mobile people—people who form the focal point of this collection of essays. Vagrancy laws are unique; while most crimes are defined by actions, vagrancy laws make no specific action or inaction illegal. Rather the laws are based on personal condition, state of being, and social and economic status.1 Individuals merely need to exhibit the characteristics or stereotypes of vagrants for authorities to make an arrest.2 Thus, vagrancy can mean and be many different things to many people, and therein lies its legal importance as a broad, overarching mechanism to control and punish a selective group of people. Yet what are these qualities that arouse the suspicion of police and transform people into vagrants? Through history, those so labeled and arrested for vagrancy have often been poor, young, able-bodied, unemployed, rootless, and homeless.3 Yet it has been the seeming vol- untary unemployment and mobility of people for which vagrancy laws have been designed.4 In general, the primary aim of vagrancy laws has been to establish control over idle individuals who could labor but Beier.1-34 10/3/08 10:14 AM Page 2

choose not to and rootless, roofless persons seemingly unfettered by traditional domestic life and free to travel outside the surveillance of the state. Over time, particularly in the twentieth century, vagrancy became a catchall category favored for a “procedural laxity” that allowed the state to convict a “motley assortment of human troubles” and circumvent “the rigidity imposed by real or imagined defects in criminal law and procedure.”5 As the geography and heterogeneity of punishable social ills increased, more and more fell under the classifi- cation of vagrancy. As a result, explaining what vagrancy means, who vagrants are, and why they attract the ire of the state, is fraught with difficulty. As this collection of essays attests, vagrants can be peasant farmers, literate ex-soldiers, famine victims, former slaves, beggars, political agitators, newsboys, migrant laborers, street people, squatters, and in some cases, those the state and the upper classes feared had breached social norms. Yet, the complicated nature of vagrancy and its connec- tions to human labor, mobility, behavior, and status have made it a useful historical tool to scholars. Historians have used the concept of vagrancy to examine a vast array of processes, including the development and impact of the market economy, migration of labor, con- struction of modern states and imperial structures, formation of subcultures among the poor, rapidity of urbanization, and responses to poverty through charity, welfare, or prosecution. Since the s, when the first historical work was conducted on vagrancy, the topic has remained divided by region and time period. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on European and American experiences from the medieval period to the twentieth century; after all vagrancy is a European invention. Even recent scholarship on vagrancy in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East has focused on periods in which European notions of poverty and vagrancy law have been adopted through the imposition or influence of European law. In many ways, this collection of essays cannot escape the European experience. However, over half the chapters focus on regions outside Europe, and in each instance the authors seek to explore the ways in which vagrancy diverged from its European counterpart once introduced to the wider world. Furthermore, the collection attempts to bridge some of

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the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary divides that have discour- aged a global history of vagrancy and homelessness. The purpose of juxtaposing these works is not to expose a uniformity of vagrancy’s form and function among nations and across centuries, but rather to explore the development of vagrancy (or lack thereof) as a common response to managing poverty, labor, and social norms, and how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities. The contributions in this collection straddle seven centuries, five continents, and several academic disciplines. They delve deeper into the struggle of societies to understand and alleviate chronic poverty, whether through private charity, criminalization, institutionalization, or compulsory labor. Some chapters illustrate the power of vagrancy laws as coercive engines in punishment and exploitation; others highlight the utter failure of vagrancy policies at the hands of human agency, state incapacity, and persistent personal charity. Several of the chapters envision vagrancy as a lifestyle, by choice and circumstance, in which people define themselves by both opposing and appropriat- ing cultural norms. The authors offer fresh perspectives on old histo- riographical debates or new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness.

Poverty and Charity in a World without Vagrancy

Most histories of vagrancy set the stage in fourteenth-century England, as the Black Death ravaged the population, both rich and poor. Schol- ars have found this to be the most appropriate place to mark the origins of the term vagrancy and the laws that followed. However, poverty was not born amid the horror of the plague, and earlier societies had their own arrangements to cope with it. In some cases, the paths into poverty and responses to it did not take on the same form as they did in fourteenth-century England; in others they formed the precur- sors to Europe’s religious charity and the struggle to determine those worthy of it. The Greeks of the classical period made a distinction between a poor person (penes) and a beggar (ptochos, “one who crouches and

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cowers”). The poor were generally considered small landowners with just enough means to survive but who could not partake in the leisure of the city-state. In Rome, beggars, or the landless and wage earning, were described by Cicero as “‘dordem urbis et faecem,’ the poverty stricken scum of the city,”who should be “drained off to the colonies.”6 Despite such colorful language, begging and destitution did not rep- resent a serious social problem in the minds of Greek and Roman city leaders; the unemployed were merely lazy. The charity of the wealthy was given out of civic pride to their beloved cities or out of pity to their wealthy neighbors who had fallen on hard times. Ac- cording to A. R. Hands, the truly poor had to seek salvation by their efforts, but options were few. They could obtain plots of land if they were willing to leave the city-states for the colonies or join the ranks of mercenary soldiers, as thousands did in the fourth century.7 In the late Roman Empire, the rise of the Christian church transformed these earlier notions of charity into concern for the well-being of the poor. Charity, or “love of the poor,”by Christians and Jews, was a new departure from the classic Greek and Roman periods. This change in outlook occurred not only because of rapid demographic growth and increasing migration of the poor to cities, but because the leaders and the rank and file of the church made room for the poor in their lives. In the late Roman Empire, the church redefined the poor to include the very beggars and destitute the classical Greeks and Romans had excluded. The pity that was reserved for unfortunate citizens in Greece was refocused on the hungry, huddled masses standing outside city gates. Moreover, the poor were not associated, as they would one day be in early modern Europe, with bandits, rogues, and barbarians of the hinterland. It was the duty of the church to spend its wealth, through its representative, the bishop, on alleviating the suffering of the poor.8 This compassion for the poor was bound to the belief that God was the supreme giver to those who believed, and likewise, that the rich man should emulate this relationship with his poorest neighbors. Over the course of the late Roman Empire, church leaders rose to prominence in their role of caretakers to the faithful as well as the poor, establishing a form of charity that would influence European society and politics for centuries to come.9

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As in Christian and Jewish communities, religion played an inte- gral role in poverty alleviation in the Muslim world. In the Middle East, Islamic and pre-Islamic Arab culture wove together to form an enduring tradition of private charity. Before and during the medieval Islamic period, gift giving by the wealthy to the poor was the primary means of poor relief and redistribution of wealth, as it was in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.10 Muslims had a religious and often legal duty to give alms to the poor. Muslim theologians stressed that poverty brought spirituality into closer focus. Dervishes among Sufi Muslims pushed this philosophy further by living in absolute poverty as a tes- tament to their religious fervor.11 Yet, not all poor were treated equally by the benevolence of the state and the wealthy. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, immigration placed a strain on the elites of Middle Eastern towns, and foreign paupers were given the lowest pri- ority on the scale of public charity. To be entitled to relief, foreigners had to seek out locals to vouch for them.12 In both Mamluk Egypt and the early modern Ottoman Empire, private, personal charity existed side by side with some public forms of poor relief. Endowments made by elite Egyptians and Ottomans to promote their piety and prestige financed many institutions aimed at aiding the poor. Soup kitchens, medical facilities, and lodging were paid for through these endowments and were often built on the grounds of imperial palaces.13 Some attempts were made to control public begging and urban migration, but these policies largely failed. Poor relief and the control of those who were known as vagrants in Europe remained part of public and private forms of charity in the Middle East. Poverty in Africa before its colonization by Europe was fueled by a dearth of labor on a land-rich continent. Iliffe has argued that the African experience was the opposite of the process that took place in an overcrowded and enclosed English countryside. Kinship networks within and among families developed as a means to avoid labor shortages.14 When areas grew overcrowded, access to land promoted out- ward migration and the establishment of new homesteads.15 Of course, the African frontier was no boundless paradise. For those Africans who did fall into poverty, environmental factors such as drought and disease forced families into extreme poverty. African empires, states,

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and ethnic groups continually struggled with one another over resources, resulting in death, displacement, and the disintegration of families. Yet kinship networks and the availability of land often spared many impoverished Africans from the itinerancy and begging that their compatriots in Europe endured.

Labor, Poverty, and Vagrancy in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

William Chambliss, one of the first social scientists to explore the historical origins of vagrancy laws, traced them back to fourteenth- century England, where the Black Death had decimated the supply of labor and increased demand and wages. As the landed elite refused to or could not meet the wage demands of their laborers, farmers fled the estates in search of work elsewhere. According to Chambliss, the  law was an attempt to halt the mobility of laborers and force them to accept lower wages.16 A year later, similar legislation was adopted in France.17 In chapter  of this volume, A. L. Beier explores the role of vagrancy legislation and compulsory labor in managing the labor markets of medieval and early modern England. He argues that before  vagrancy and labor regulations sought to control wages and meet labor demand in a market suffering from severe plague-induced shortages. After , as the labor market shifted to one of surplus, the primary functions of vagrancy laws became labor discipline and social control. Thus vagrancy and labor laws were at the forefront of an early class struggle in England as civil and ecclesiastical authorities, merchants, and landowning elites were confronted with a growing number of mobile, unskilled, and unemployed poor. Historians have compiled a long list of factors that played a role in the increasing concern about poverty in early modern Europe, including population growth, declining wages, rising costs of living, disease, famine, and military conflict. While poor migrants begged for survival, civil and ecclesiastic authorities worried about disorder and the subversive potential of the poor.18 Returning soldiers were trained in violence, street performers attracted crowds, beggars spread dis-

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ease, and hawkers infringed on guild regulations.19 Humanists like J. L. Vives desired “a world of order, moderation, and piety” through education and hard work.20 Europe’s literati also had a hand in fos- tering a fear of the poor. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries literature on vagrancy boomed in which authors described vagrants as a seething mass of criminals lurking beneath the social order, ready to thrust society into anarchy.21 In chapter , Linda Woodbridge examines how returning soldiers-turned-vagrants were some of the most demonized figures in early modern literature. Yet some genres like theater were sympathetic to the plight of homeless ex-soldiers. Over time, these veteran vagabonds became literate, published work, and exposed the government’s neglect and the injus- tice of their poverty. While vagrants and the poor were reviled and demonized in much of the popular press of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Woodbridge reminds her audience that the poor, too, had a voice. Demobilized soldiers filled the ranks of Europe’s poor, but others shared in their poverty. Most people labeled as vagrants were single young men who traveled long distances alone or in small groups. Women, children, the elderly, and large families were only a small por- tion of those labeled as vagrants. This would remain a characteristic of vagrancy for centuries to come. For early modern England, Beier explains that demographic change had an influential impact on the number of youths in poverty. The majority of the population was under the age of twenty-one and young people were forced to leave home and seek employment when their families dissolved or they were cast out for bastardy, familial conflict, or extreme poverty.22 Va- grants also traveled long distances. While there existed networks of regional and seasonal travel by which the traveling poor moved between local towns, festivals, and areas with employment opportunities, much of the movement of vagrants must be described as long-distance migration, often over a hundred miles.23 Moreover, vagrancy was predominantly an urban phenomenon.24 Cities in England and France strained to contain the massive influx of rural migrants who, when they arrived in the city, could find no work and no accommodation. Hous- ing in early modern European towns was a precious commodity, and

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often the poor slept together in crammed, rented rooms in alehouses and other private lodgings.25 The rising levels of extreme poverty and migration began to strain preexisting forms of poor relief.26 In medieval Europe, as in the late Roman Empire, poverty had been closely associated with Christian theology. The poor were a necessary part of social life and performed a significant role in the ability of the wealthy to perform good works and earn salvation.27 Yet, the clergy and wealthy believed they could no longer manage the hundreds of people begging for charity, and over the course of the sixteenth century a dramatic shift occurred in the management of the poor. State authorities began to assume responsi- bility for poor relief, and vagrancy laws were adapted not simply to manipulate the labor market but to control the movement and behavior of the poor. Civil and religious authorities began categorizing the poor, distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving as well as local and foreign paupers. Orphans, widows, the physically and mentally disabled, and the aged qualified for state and ecclesiastical assistance; yet the able-bodied poor—vagrants, who allegedly chose idle lives—were given work or punishment. A whole new vocabulary of poverty was developed, as were a series of enhanced vagrancy laws and institutions to manage the behavior of unworthy paupers. In England, sixteenth-century vagrancy acts and the Poor Law of  had a profound impact on the state. The English judicial system underwent significant changes to meet the demands of arrest and removal of the poor. New methods of classifying criminals and vagrants as well as courtroom procedures such as trial by jury and oral testi- mony came into practice. Martial law was occasionally used to round up the idle and unemployed.28 According to Beier, perhaps the most influential change came with the expansion of punishments for vagrancy and other crimes of poverty. Vagrants who refused work could be branded with a V, enslaved, and, in the most extreme cases, exe- cuted. However, the most common punishment was corporal punishment in combination with repatriation to one’s parish, where relief was distributed or compulsory employment was found.29 Other popular forms of punishment were impressment into military service and transportation to overseas colonies.

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Some of the most dramatic forms of state intervention in the lives of the poor were the hospitals and bridewells that sprang up throughout Europe. In cities like Strasbourg, Basel, and Ypres new systems of poor relief outlawed begging, constructed hospitals to care for the worthy poor, and tried to correct the behavior of undeserving vagrants. In Lyon, the Aumône-Générale was developed in the s to redistribute wealth to the deserving poor. House-to-house visits by oﬃcers were used to gather information on the poor, tickets were is- sued to the poor to control the length and amount of aid to be given, and deaths were recorded to ensure relief was discontinued. In  the infamous Bridewell Hospital was created in London for the reform of beggars and vagrants through discipline and hard work. In the rest of Europe, institutions like the Dutch Tuchthuis and Spunhuis, French dépôts de mendicité, and German Zuchthäuser institutionalized the undeserving poor to punish their idleness and compel them to work while seeking to relieve the worthy indigent from their suﬀer- ing.30 In the midst of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the state and ecclesiastical authorities of Europe had reengineered poverty from a state of holiness and reverence to one of disease and disorder managed through a blend of charity and repression.

The Eighteenth Century and the Great Conﬁnement

By the end of the seventeenth century, European eﬀorts to relieve poverty and compel the idle to work still confronted large numbers of paupers; and economic crises, bad harvests, and warfare remained just a few of the principle drivers of impoverishment. Government oﬃcials and wealthy elites continued to panic, producing vivid ac- counts of wandering, criminal hordes terrorizing the respectable classes. It was believed that great bands of vagabonds pillaged the northern French countryside and that England was awash with Irish and Scottish indigents.31 Vagrants became increasingly connected to organized crime and violence and were viewed by contemporary writers as a dangerous and subversive subculture thriving in the slums of Europe’s cities.32 In response, European states increasingly relied on

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institutionalization and incarceration. In France, the state sought new repressive means of controlling the poor such as urban police sweeps, mass arrests and convictions, expanded facilities to punish vagrants, and new schemes to prevent criminality.33 Two separate schemes were developed in France: ateliers de charité for the relief of the able-bodied poor willing to work and dépôts de mendicité for the incarceration and punishment of vagrants. The ancien régime understood that most vagrants were poor, migrating farmers searching for work. The ateliers de charité were designed to prevent this group from slipping into vagrancy and criminality by offering them employment partially paid by the state and inculcating in them a sense of labor discipline.34 Those poor laborers who joined the schemes were organized into teams often made up of entire families, given supplies like shovels and wheelbarrows, and paid according to the amount work they did. By the time of the French Revolution, ateliers de charité were the preferred form of relief among poor rural laborers during winter months and temporarily unemployed industrial workers.35 For vagrants and the intransigent idlers, dépôts de mendicité were developed in  as places of internment, much like England’s bridewells. According to Hufton, in , , of the , vagrants placed in dépôts died while incarcerated. In the city of Vannes, the mortality rate of vagrants was  percent.36 Such horrific conditions led many, including Voltaire and Mon- tesquieu, to decry the confinement of the poor and to call for employment opportunities, not prison cells, to be made available to all paupers.37 In addition, the ability of the French state to arrest beggars and the poor living on the streets was severely constrained. In towns of five thousand inhabitants, the police numbered fewer than four, except in larger towns like Paris and Rouen.38 Even the successful ateliers de charité could not eliminate extreme poverty in French cities and mass migration in the countryside.39 Indeed other European countries were finding their experimentation with confinement diffi- cult to maintain. In Spain the Bourbons worked to expand the power of the state and brought poor relief under greater state control by con- structing workhouses known as juntas de caridad. Many Catholic clergy embraced the Bourbon reforms and opened their own workhouses,

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arguing that religious instruction could save the poor from the sin of vagrancy.40 Yet financial shortcomings stunted the expansion of the policy, and the Bourbons were forced to ask the church for donations to keep workhouses operating. In addition, the Spanish public con- demned the workhouses as prisons and undermined Bourbon efforts by continuing privately to give alms to beggars.41 Around the same time and across the Mediterranean, Ottoman subjects also continued to rely on private, individual charity and the endowments of the imperial family and wealthy elites. Between handouts, hospitals, and soup kitchens, poor relief remained a personal experience between the be- neficent elite and gracious poor. Ottoman officials took few actions against the begging and traveling poor except during periods of crisis.42 In England officials struggled with the desire to experiment with systematic incarceration and continued to rely on their unique brand of poor relief and wide-ranging vagrancy laws. The  Settlement and Removal Act had determined that any visitors, traveling laborers, or beggars had to be returned to their home parishes. Once home, their parishes were required to punish or find labor for vagrants and provide relief for the truly needy. The act was decried as turning local communities into prisons and overburdening parishes with the financial and logistical costs of poor relief. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb have argued, English vagrancy laws and the Poor Law had transformed poor relief into a system of rewards by which bounty hunters, private contractors, and corrupt officials preyed on the innocent for personal enrichment. Moreover, the laws had been reduced to simply passing vagrants from parish to parish with local communities pay- ing the bill.43 In light of these abuses and failures, officials called for greater systematic incarceration to buttress the Poor Law and give added bite to vagrancy laws. However, magistrates resisted these demands, and where the Webbs saw failure, other scholars have seen some success. Nicholas Rogers argues that magistrates witnessed firsthand a variety of poor persons passing through their courts and wanted to maintain their wide discre- tionary power. In their eyes, not every vagrant belonged in bridewells, and the passing system allowed the down-and-out to find some relief in the parishes.44 However, this does not imply that vagrancy laws

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had lost their punitive and repressive nature. Vagrancy laws continued to compel laborers to work and prevent them from engaging in trades that threatened merchants and industrialists. Poor young men were swept up from the bridewells and city streets and impressed into military service. Commentators of the time argued that, though tyrannical, impressment kept the streets clear and transformed undesirable men into “the most industrious People, and even becoming the very nerves of our State.”45 Indeed some vagrants pressed into military service became part of the very apparatus seeking to repress them, and as the poor became the building blocks of nations, so too would they provide the foundations for empires. The expansion of European economic interests and overseas territories had profound implications for the uses of vagrancy laws and the indigenous peo- ples who would come to be known as vagabonds.

Vagrancy, Slavery, and Empire

In , John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, exalted the planta- tions of Virginia because they provided “Not only a spleen, to drain the ill humours of the body, but a liver to breed good blood; already the employment breeds mariners; already the place gives essays, nay freights of merchantable commodities; already it is a mark for the envy, and for the ambition of our enemies.”46 For Donne, the imperial frontier oﬀered Europe a “safety-valve” to banish its poor and criminal and an opportunity to transform vagrants into productive building blocks of empire.47 England and Portugal developed some of the earliest and most systematized schemes for transporting vagrants abroad. In Portugal criminals, vagrants, orphans, and women of ill repute were rounded up, sentenced to exile, and transported to colonies like Brazil and Goa. Their destinations were determined by which colonies suﬀered from shortages of labor. Known as degradados, many went on to play pivotal roles in their adopted colonies. Thieves became soldiers, prostitutes became wives, and orphans became apprenticed artisans.48 In the reign of James I, English adult and child vagrants were shipped to the

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struggling colony of Virginia. Young people were a particular target for transportation—ideal recruits for businesspersons and government alike. The Virginia Company, in desperate need of labor, encouraged the recruitment and forced transport of young people. With slavery years from taking root, young people were well suited for apprentice- ship and indentured servitude. Planters and artisans gained an abun- dant source of laborers, whose transportation would be paid for by the government and to whom they had no contractual obligation. And the government had a seemingly endless pit into which it could pour those overcrowding its jails and houses of correction.49 Alder- men were instructed to round up street children and orphans, recruit willing youths, and convince poor parents to give up their children. Be- ginning in , seventy-five vagrant boys and twenty-four “wenches” were rounded up, collected at Bridewell Hospital, and sent to Virginia. In the following year the Virginia Company requested several more groups of vagrant youths.50 Throughout the eighteenth century,  percent of emigrants across the Atlantic were between the ages of fifteen and nineteen and a further  percent under fifteen.51 Most children were handed over to merchants and ship commanders and taken to the Caribbean, to islands like Jamaica and Barbados, while some were passed along to artisans or sugar growers.52 Not all European vagrants living overseas were considered productive or desirable, and vagrancy laws were established in the colonies to expel or control the growing numbers of failed entrepreneurs and adventurers who had found little fortune in the frontier. According to Sabine MacCormick, Spanish vagrants in Peru represented a wholly different problem than those in Spain. Spanish colonists complained that Spanish vagrants harassed and menaced Indian communities, but because of their Spanish heritage little could be done to stop them. Instead, charity had to be forthcoming in the form of free housing and food.53 In the British Empire, vagrancy laws were quickly employed to rid port cities of drunken, idle, disorderly Euro- peans. In cities like Calcutta and Zanzibar, European vagrants were an affront to colonial sensibilities and a public display of European weakness that had to remain hidden.54 Administrators also feared that vagrant Europeans aggravated local communities and fomented

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conflict, or that their idleness influenced groups whose labor was increasingly vital to the maintenance of empire. The role of vagrancy in Europe’s overseas territories was not lim- ited to transporting and deporting European paupers; the laws were also used to shape the labor discipline and social order of indigenous communities. As miners in Peru and South Africa as well as farmers in Brazil and Kenya required more access to labor than the free market could provide, a whole host of laws, of which one was vagrancy, was used to control laborers who demanded higher wages, migrated to other areas, or chose not to exchange their labor for wages. Relying on free labor was especially perilous in slave economies increasingly under attack from abolitionists. As emancipation came to areas of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Latin America, landowners and authorities feared economic collapse when free persons fled their former masters. Vagrancy laws were deployed in Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century as well as in Sudan, northern Nigeria, and francophone West Africa in the early twentieth century for precisely this reason. In each instance, vagrancy laws forced any non-Europeans deemed wandering or idle by authorities to labor on private companies or government projects.55 In Cape Colony, the proposed Vagrancy Act of  faced vociferous opposition from the Anti-Slavery Society as well as the African population, which mobilized to prevent the measure from being passed. In chapter , Richard Allen explores the ways in which colonial Mauritius typifies how vagrancy maintained imbalanced labor relations and how laboring communities resisted colonial authority during slavery’s slow death. Vagrancy laws also had a role in colonies where no slave economies existed but where rich natural resources like silver, diamonds, and fertile soils were found. In early colonial Peru the conquest of the Incan state, the collapse of its redistributive economy, and large-scale death from disease created levels of poverty and dislocation unparalleled to that seen in Europe at the time.56 The establishment of silver mines at Potosí in the mid-sixteenth century drove the Spanish to compel indigenous communities to work at the mines. However, In- cans quickly used migration, especially urban migration, to escape the dangerous work at Potosí and to seek more lucrative opportunities.

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These migrants, known as forasteros, became in some ways the Peruvian equivalent of European vagrants. Throughout the seventeenth century colonial authorities tried in vain to eliminate forasteros by moving families into prefabricated settlements known as reducciones.57 Sev- eral centuries later, as Andrew Burton and Paul Ocobock argue in chapter , British officials tried to mobilize African labor in similar ways. The authors examine the alienation of some African communities in Kenya from their land to make way for European settlement and the use of vagrancy to deflect Africans from migrating to towns and compel them to work on European agricultural estates and government projects.58 In colonies like Peru and Kenya, among others, the need for vagrancy arose when Europeans, making new homes for themselves, contributed to the dislocation and homelessness of indigenous communities. As Europeans built their estates, expanded their marketplaces, and planned their public squares, indigenous communities were left homeless and were pushed into the peripheries of urban and commercial life. The literature on vagrancy in imperial settings has, in general, focused on urban spaces, where anxious colonizers came into closest contact with poverty and marginalization. In the small, isolated communities of colonial New England, fear of the moral hazards of strangers and the burden of poor relief led many communities to banish the traveling poor. While the ever-expanding western frontier of eighteenth-century America offered the poor a property outlet, the eighteenth century also witnessed a rise in the number of poor due to the French-Indian War and King Philip’s War, continual conflict with Native Americans, and destitution of former indentured servants.59 In response, settlements and towns turned to English vagrancy laws to keep the poor from overwhelming community resources. In larger communities and in more developed and racially diverse colonies, urban spaces acquired deep social hierarchies. In colonial Mexico City, Gabriel Haslip-Viera has argued that crime and punishment under eighteenth-century Bourbon rule were made to serve the social hierarchy of colonial society. Arrest, incarceration, and institutionalization controlled the unemployed, rooted them in their poverty, and preserved the social boundaries between the elite, middling

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class, and poor.60 Other colonial historians such as Silvia Arrom have argued that policies of incarceration and reform in Mexico City did little to discipline the poor or alleviate their suffering. The city’s poorhouse aimed to round up the idle, poor, and disorderly from the streets; yet, the state was unable to effectively differentiate between vago y viciosos—able-bodied vagrants capable of work—and beggars worthy of charity.61 Over time, confusion over policy, state incapacity to sort accurately the increasing numbers of urban poor, and financial constraints transformed the poorhouse from a mechanism of social and racial order into a place of safety for Hispanic women and children. The poorhouse of Mexico City was certainly no Foucauldian “total regime.”62 In the cities of colonial Africa, especially those with a large Euro- pean emigrant community, the element of race was more explicit. In colonies like Namibia and South Africa, scholars have shown that vagrancy laws were aimed at preserving segregation. European settlers held deep-seated anxieties over the uncontrolled migration and poverty of Africans, especially single, young men. Fears of “black peril” or the sexual abuse of white women at the hands of African men often underpinned the use of vagrancy-related roundups.63 Va- grancy laws served as a “massive local anesthetic” to sedate the worst psychological and economic insecurities of European settlers.64 Yet vagrancy was not solely designed to placate settler fears or buttress segregation; rather, colonial officials believed it was one of a few strategies to combat the breakdown of law and order. In chapter , Burton and Ocobock argue that in British East Africa, vagrancy laws were seen by the administration as one of the few means to curb African crime, ease urbanization, and maintain African social order. As the authors contend, vagrancy was a way officials could slow what they believed was the detribalization of African communities.“Tribes” were crucial to the structure of the colonial apparatus, and so colonial officials arrested and returned single young men and women to their rural areas and families in a vain attempt to secure traditional forms of discipline and values. Yet, like Arrom’s characterization of Mexico City, the hopes of colonial officials in British East Africa were dashed by constant financial and logistical constraints.

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As transformative as colonialism was in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it was often hounded by profound incapacity. In a nod to the limits of colonial military, economic, and political might, the British designed their colonial administration, known as indirect rule, around fiscal conservatism, or empire on the cheap. In chapter , David Arnold illustrates the marginal role played by the East India Company, and later the British state, in the relief of poverty in colonial India. Arnold argues that poor relief following intense famines in eighteenth-century India remained in the hands of private Indian philanthropists. British colonial administrations in India were little concerned with the welfare of their most desperate subjects. While vagrancy laws could be cut from European legal texts and pasted into colonial legislation, their application often diverged dramatically in colonial contexts. While the maintenance of unequal labor relations and law and order remained the core characteristics of vagrancy laws, virulent racism, financial and logistical shortcomings, colonial notions of indigenous social structures, and genuine lack of interest in reliev- ing the suffering of indigent subjects altered the nature of vagrancy in empires. The limitations of the colonial enterprise and its ability to effectively dictate labor policy and social norms also had implications for societies that won hard-fought freedom from imperial powers. Thomas Holloway and Robert Gordon describe the struggle newly formed states endure with their colonial legacies. While Holloway and Gordon come from different disciplines—history and anthropology, respectively—they both examine how newly formed states relied on vagrancy laws left over from the colonial period to reinforce their grip on society. In chapter , Holloway, on nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, demonstrates the constant struggle of police and magistrates to meet the demands of an urban elite clamoring for clean streets, the expectations of the modern bureaucratic state, and the long tradi- tions of Christian charity. In chapter , Gordon describes the ways in which an independent Papua New Guinea endures its colonial legacies. He discusses the government’s constant threat of reviving that country’s vagrancy laws and exposes the ineffectiveness of the post- colonial state. He argues that Papua New Guinea was plagued by a

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“ceremonial state”; one inherited from colonial rule and merely over- laid onto a series of social structures that competed with and para- sitized the power of the government. Ultimately, oﬃcials in Papua New Guinea had little actual authority and were equipped only with the means of appearing in control. The imperial legacy lingers on in many nations, some nearly a half-century old, and the use or threat of vagrancy laws have been discovered as useful tools by a new generation of political leaders.

Tramp Armies, New Poor Laws, and Labor Colonies in the Nineteenth Century

As colonial administrations set about using vagrancy laws to control imperial subjects and newly independent states struggled with this heritage, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought signiﬁcant changes to the nature of vagabondage and the use of vagrancy laws in Europe, the United States, and other regions of the globe. In the United States vagrancy laws in the colonial period have been por- trayed as a means for small, isolated communities to shield themselves from the moral decay of the homeless and the burden of poor relief. The rhetoric of the evil vagrant lingered on well into the nineteenth century. In  the mayor of St. Louis stated that vagrancy laws were used to “lessen the intemperance evil amongst us.”65 Yet, authorities in St. Louis, like their counterparts in other rapidly devel- oping cities, had to curb their rhetoric. Rapidly urbanizing and in- dustrializing cities depended on the migration, labor, and investment of mobile Americans. In St. Louis vagrancy laws were altered to focus on suspicious persons rather than the unemployed and poor. Indeed, as the nineteenth century progressed vagrancy laws were directed at professional criminals and crimes against property and businesses. When the economy was booming, anyone who threatened the safety and pocketbooks of the city’s entrepreneurs were harshly dealt with. Yet in times of economic hardship, the poor and idle were again rounded up.66 In many ways the war against poverty and itinerancy in Ameri- can cities like St. Louis shared many characteristics with the rest of

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the world. War, economic crisis, and demographic change compelled authorities to oscillate between periods of repression and indifference. As levels of crime and unemployment soared in nineteenth-century American cities, punishments under vagrancy laws grew harsher. The literature on American homelessness in the nineteenth century, as Toby Higbie illustrates in chapter , provides some unique and remarkable insights into the lives of the poor and destitute. The end of the Civil War and the depression of – created a massive population of demobilized soldiers and out-of-work laborers. In Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Illinois, two-thirds of vagrants were veterans.67 This massive, dispossessed population of men became commonly known as tramps and hobos. Before the Civil War, a tramp had been a long, tiresome walk or journey.68 As applied to a person, tramp was certainly an accurate term, as American vagrants covered more ground in the search for employment than most of their global counterparts. The major expansion of transportation systems such as railroads and canals in the nineteenth century opened up the Ameri- can West. American laborers could now travel across great swaths of the countryside in search of work, and levels of urban crowding and vagrancy arrests soared. Between  and  vagrancy arrests in New York City grew by  percent and overnight lodging in Philadel- phia police stations increased fourfold. The railroads dispersed the unemployed and poor to areas that until the s had little experience with poor relief. Throughout the period, farmers, local towns- men, and the police battled bands of vagrants in Pennsylvania cities like Harrisburg, Altoona, and Fulton.69 As the freedom of labor increased, so too did the number of those ready to exploit it. Although the railroads and unparalleled itinerancy made vagrancy a national obsession, vagrants also provided entrepreneurs in the frontier with a cheap supply of labor. As Monkkonen argues, a “symbiotic relationship” between cities and railroads developed. Railroads delivered laborers to the cities of the American West, where employers could find labor for their farms and businesses. The police aided employers by housing tramps during the working sea- sons and arresting them for vagrancy in the off-season to placate the fears of local townsfolk.70 Cities like Omaha, Minneapolis, and San

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Francisco were known as main stems, where migrant workers, fresh off the train, could socialize with their fellow travelers, find cheap food and housing, learn about possible employment opportunities, and find further transport. By World War I, San Francisco was housing forty thousand tramps at night, and Chicago was known to have housed even more.71 By taking advantage of new forms of transportation and urban hubs, the vagrants of the nineteenth century crisscrossed the American landscape from New York to Chicago to Omaha to San Francisco, some even traveling as far as Europe and the Philippines.72 Who made up these incredibly mobile tramp armies, as they were known by contemporaries? The literature is surprisingly detailed. The majority of these traveling laborers were, like most of those charged with vagrancy, single young men. According to John C. Schneider, they ranged between the ages of twenty and forty, were unmarried, mostly of European descent, and between  and  percent were born outside the United States, mainly in Britain and Canada.73 Tramp life was a distinctively white, male, and often homoerotic realm. Tramps were not generally welcoming of female and African American wanderers. Women represented a radical departure from hobo social norms, which were, in turn, opposed to domestic life and the influence of women in the household. To tramps, females were vagrants and criminals, an abomination of true hobo life.74 As much as male tramps despised their female counterparts, mainstream society did not take kindly to wandering women either. Female vagrants represented the breakdown of the traditional household and loosening of sexual mores. These women were seen as unredeemable and left to ride the rails on their own terms. However, young single females arriving in cities looking for work and housing were considered salvageable as long as they quickly found a partner, married, and started a family.75 In addition to the gendered nature of vagrancy in the United States, there existed a racial element as well. In Virginia, vagrancy was primarily used to control disorderly former servants trying to pur- chase land. During the antebellum period vagrancy was brought to bear on returning runaway slaves to their masters.76 In the postbel-

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lum South, the Black Codes and vagrancy laws were used to force freed slaves into contracts, as had been done in other slave economies transitioning to the free labor market. Yet, Amy Dru Stanley argues that throughout the s and s these increasingly harsh laws were part of a broader concern among Americans that begging and vagrancy were eroding free labor. Scientific philanthropists railed against indiscriminate almsgiving, arguing that it created a system of dependency and doomed the free labor market.77 By criminalizing vagrancy and begging, placing the poor in workhouses, and putting them to hard and unpleasant work charity reformers believed they could inculcate a desire to work for pay under contract. According to Dru Stanley,“the vagrancy laws held beggars strictly to the rule of exchange, transforming charity into a punitive bargain.”78 As determined as some authorities may have been to discipline migrant laborers, the underclass of nineteenth-century America proved itself willing and able to resist such discipline from above. In  a nationwide strike occurred for which tramps were blamed. During the strike over one hundred thousand workers walked off the job, effectively shutting down St. Louis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.79 As Higbie argues in chapter , the Industrial Workers of the World and other labor organizations drew heavily from tramp communities, and former hobos were some of the most prolific agitators for labor reforms. Higbie’s chapter also illustrates how countless tramps put their travels to paper and had a hand in shaping public perception and a romantic, literary form of vagrancy. Yet, tramps were not simply a force of opposition against industry. As Vince DiGirolamo argues in chapter , the young newsboys of New York City, often viewed as juvenile vagrants, were part of complicated and reciprocal rela- tionships with some of the most powerful companies in nineteenth- century America: the media. The relationship was by no means equal, but the newspapers and vagrant youths of New York and other cities sustained and reinforced one another. In Europe and parts of the Middle East, the nineteenth century was a time for reflecting on past failures to “solve” the problem of poverty by undertaking serious reforms. The result, as Timothy Smith argues

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for late-nineteenth-century France, was a blending of assistance and repression more intrusive than the century before. In Britain authorities were certain that the Poor Law had become a dismal failure. The number of vagrants had increased after the Napoleonic Wars and the depression of –, and the parish relief system lacked uniformity and had reached unparalleled costs. In  the total poor rate reached a height of £,, and the percentage of paupers peaked at ..80 The presumed failure of the Poor Law and vagrancy laws reinforced a growing concern with not only the destitute but underclass Britons more generally. Concern often turned to vigilantism. Mendicity societies, or perhaps more appropriately antivagrancy posses, took mat- ters into their own hands, making civilian arrests and registering vagrants for the authorities.81 In chapter , Beier’s close reading of Henry Mayhew’s work reveals a near obsession among English elites that vagrants and the underclass were connected to a dangerous criminal underworld. As illustrated by the writing of Mayhew, it was believed that the jargon spoken among the poor was in fact a common language used to facilitate crime. Beier argues that this language was by no means uniform to the entire poor population of London, but it provided a potent symbol of the troubling growth of poverty and crime in Britain. Concern whipped up by writers like Mayhew and the failure of the Poor Law and vagrancy laws sparked a series of Parliamentary inquiries into simplifying and reforming the vagrancy and settlement laws. In addition, the reform-minded Robert Peel became Home Secretary in  and set about creating the Metropoli- tan Police Force and passing a new Vagrancy Act in  and Poor Law in .82 One of the chief aims of the  act was to reduce the cost of repatriation among parishes and criminalize sleeping out, eﬀectively making homelessness an act of vagrancy.83 Under the  Poor Law, parishes were merged into unions to standardize relief among the “deserving” and casual wards were created to give vagrants temporary, overnight shelter. Casual wards were a response to the continued refusal of workhouse authorities of admitting vagrants and petty criminals. Designed as shelters, the wards quickly adopted a punitive structure. To deter sleeping out in the open, the wards would force vagrants who had used them overnight to spend their

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day laboring on government projects. Unsanitary conditions, hard labor, and abuse by authorities kept many homeless people out on the streets.84 In France the Napoleonic Wars and extreme rural poverty created a mass exodus of the poor from the countryside to French cities. Ac- cording to Smith, what seemed like middle-class hysteria in the late nineteenth century was in fact a reality: the cities of France were awash in beggars, paupers, and desperate criminals. Between  and  the population in the Rhône increased by ,, mainly from rural migration from the Massif Central. Meanwhile, in Paris, between one-third and one-half of all arrests fell under vagrancy laws.85 The response of the administration was in many ways similar to those in the eighteenth century. Schemes for assistance were developed for the deserving poor, while vagrants and undesirable paupers were prosecuted. At the turn of the century, tens of thousands of people were removed from the assistance rolls because they were believed to be undeserving of poor relief. This national obsession with denying poor relief to vagrants stemmed from a new scientific vision of vagabondage. The behavior of the idle poor was increasingly seen as the result of a deviant psychology that could be passed down from generation to generation. It was part of popular urban degeneration theories that had gained currency throughout Europe at the time. Armed with social Darwinism, many scholarly writers came to be- lieve that the urban poor were a danger to social order and weakened domestic households. It was in the street that young men and women met: “With bad companions, [they] find a delight in spectacles like that of a man being dragged to gaol or of a drunken quarrel, which can only degrade their character, and encounter nothing but what fosters and appeals to their animal nature.”86 Writers like Charles Masterman believed the child of the city became as unnatural and uncontrollable as his environment. The urban lifestyle did not produce the modern man; rather “civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”87 And vagrants in fin-de-siècle France were treated as such. In  alone, , vagrants were transported to colonial, overseas prisons. In addition, the Republicans borrowed the dépôts de mendicité from

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the ancien régime, and vagrants could be imprisoned for three to six months or placed under state surveillance for up to ten years.88 European states also turned to labor colonies in the nineteenth century. In  the Netherlands began to experiment with labor colonies as a way of confining and disciplining vagrants. Other Euro- pean countries, like Switzerland and Belgium, followed suit. Belgium developed a colony at Merxplas, where in  six hundred men were employed in workshops with a further one hundred in farming. They were divided between the old and infirm, the young, and the im- moral, including homosexuals and the mentally ill. All were to be incarcerated for three to seven years.89 Perhaps the largest and most expansive labor colony of them all was Siberia, where tsarist and, later, Soviet authorities banished and incarcerated millions of paupers, un- desirables, and political dissenters. In chapter , Andrew Gentes explores the development of laws against brodiazhestvo, vagabondage in Russia, and the extents to which the tsarist regime went to rid the streets of St. Petersburg and other cities of the idle poor. Gentes views Siberian exile and tsarist policies as modern, disciplinarian processes, much in the spirit of what Michel Foucault described in France. Indeed the nineteenth century was a period of growing state intervention in the lives of the poor outside Europe. In the Middle East the Ottoman Empire and Egyptian state were experimenting with a greater state role in poor relief. Under the khedive in Cairo, a small bureaucracy began to depersonalize charity. Poor relief began to in- volve bureaucrats like police officers, poorhouse employees, and medical officers rather than private philanthropists. Over time the Dabitiyya, the central police station, became the space where those in need could ask for assistance and those deemed vagrants were brought for deportation.90 According to Ferdan Ergut, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and rise of constitutionalism under the Committee of Union and Progress in , the Ottomans also began to experiment with an expanded state role in the lives of the poor. Following many of the reforms made in France, the Ottomans began to adopt a series of categories to weed out the deserving from the undeserving. Punishment for vagrants included exile to remote cities like Baghdad and corporal punishment.91 In regions where begging and homeless-

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ness were once managed through private charity, the state ultimately assumed the mantle of poor relief.

World Wars and Welfare States in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century, with its world wars and rise of welfare-oriented states, had a profound impact on the nature of vagrancy and homelessness.92 In Europe and the United States governments and employers moved away from the compulsory labor of the idle and violent repression of the homeless. Instead they encouraged the development of a sedentary and permanent workforce and a blending of state and nonstate welfare schemes. After World War I, American industrialists promoted welfare capitalism as a means to control labor discipline. Pensions, vacations, insurance, loans, and stock options became part of a new system of disciplining labor.93 Mechanization of industry also had an impact on the demand for unskilled labor. The combine alone disrupted the work of one hundred ﬁfty thousand Great Plains harvesters, just as the automobile altered migration patterns and the state’s ability to round up tramps. While the Great Depression sank millions of Americans into curbing destitution, sympathy for the down-and-out grew, and Roosevelt’s Federal Transient Scheme aimed to link local, state, federal and nongovernmental services to provide shelter, health care, and food to the American people.94 Dur- ing World War II the draft and wartime economy radically reduced the unemployed population in Europe and the United States. After the war, the problem of returning soldiers slipping into vagrancy was addressed by legislation like the American G.I. Bill, which ensured most demobilized soldiers and their families received housing. Tech- nical training, employment opportunities, and suburban life seemed to have killed the tramp.95 Perhaps more important were changing perceptions of the poor and personal freedoms. At the turn of the century, intellectuals like T. H. Green and Henry Sidgwick concluded that poverty was the root of vagrancy rather than a genetic predisposition to laziness.96 More- over, throughout the s and s, numerous cases before state

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and federal courts began to question the constitutionality of vagrancy laws.97 In  the issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville. One of the cases included in the suit involved the arrest of Margaret Papachristou and Betty Calloway (both white women) and Eugene Eddie Melton and Leonard Johnson (both black men), who were riding in Papachristou’s car after having dinner at a diner owned by Johnson’s family. According to police, the four were arrested when they pulled over on the side of the road outside a used-car lot, which had been burgled several times. All four of the occupants of the car were charged with vagrancy, speciﬁcally “prowling by auto.”The other cases involved African American young men who were charged with vagrancy for loitering on the street and being suspected of thievery. In a -to- decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Jacksonville Vagrancy Ordinance was too vague for citizens to understand what sorts of conduct were illegal. It also crimi- nalized innocent behavior and invested too much power in the hands of authorities.98 Vagrancy laws like the one employed by the city of Jacksonville were suddenly invalidated in the United States. Yet not all states abandoned the notion that beggars and vagrants could be institutionalized and reformed. As Aminda Smith argues in chapter , the Communist regime in China tried unsuccessfully to reeducate beggars in the s. What was meant as a strategy to transform petty criminals into dedicated, nation-building peasants often slipped into the realm of fantasy and farce. In many ways, the reeducation centers of Communist China were as unsuccessful as Europe’s vagrancy laws in colonial Africa, policies that are still used by African states to this day. Yet even as welfare programs expanded in the later half of the twentieth century, and focused on the eradication of poverty and reform of the idle poor, homelessness has not disappeared from the public view or imagination. Poverty has been increasingly ghettoized and hidden from view in urban centers, while the wealthy have retreated behind suburban, gated communities protected by private security ﬁrms. Signs of failure, those homeless who remain in public, are considered unredeemable and even resistant to poor relief. Yet, the last chapter of this volume makes a striking argument against views that

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vagrants and the homeless are resistant or even hostile to work discipline or “traditional” cultural norms. Abby Margolis’s work on the homeless of Tokyo’s Ueno Park vividly illustrates that sleeping out is a way of life, but not necessarily one in opposition to the world around it. Rather, the homeless of Ueno Park maintain and appropriate conventional Japanese social norms, even so far as to have their own prejudices against other homeless communities.

In  , people were arrested for vagrancy in the United States, representing only . percent of the over  million arrests made that year.99 This ﬁgure underscores that while vagrancy laws, and even the term vagrant, have lost currency in the later decades of the twentieth century, the destitute continue to live on the street and scratch an ex- istence out of charity and petty crime. Fear of the disorderly and criminal potential of the homeless persists, too, as does the eﬀort by governments the world over to arrest, discipline, institutionalize, reeducate, or reform their most marginalized citizens. As long as there is, in some, a desperate need to escape poverty and willingness to wander, and, in others, a desire for safety and orderliness, there will be vagrancy laws and vagrants to prosecute.

Notes

Special thanks must be extended to Robert Tignor, whose support made possible the conference from which some of these papers were derived and who greatly improved this introduction. I also thank Kevin Dumouchelle, John-Paul Ghobrial, Jennifer Johnson, and Elena Schneider for their help and friendship. Finally, thanks to A. L. Beier, who agreed to help me with this project and has been a constant source of encouragement. . Forrest W. Lacey, “Vagrancy and Other Crimes of Personal Condi- tion,” Harvard Law Review ,no. (): –. . Gary V. Dubin and Richard B. Robinson, “The Vagrancy Concept Reconsidered: Problems and Abuses of Status Criminality,” New York University Law Review  (January ): , . . A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, – (London: Methuen, ), xxii.

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. Lacey, “Vagrancy,” . . Caleb Foote, “Vagrancy-Type Law and Its Administration,” Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Law Review ,no. (): , . . A. R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . . Ibid., –, –. . Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, ), –, , –, . . Ibid., , . . Michael Bonner, “Poverty and Charity in the Rise of Islam,” in Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Michael Bonner, Mine Ener, and Amy Singer (Albany: SUNY Press, ), . . Adam Sabra, Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . Mark Cohen, “The Foreign Jewish Poor in Medieval Egypt,” in Bonner, Ener, and Singer, Poverty and Charity, , . .Sabra,Poverty and Charity, ; Miri Shefer, “Charity and Hospi- tality: Hospitals in the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period,” in Bonner, Ener, and Singer, Poverty and Charity, , –. . John Iliﬀe, The African Poor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . See Igor Kopytoﬀ, The African Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). . William J. Chambliss, “A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Va- grancy,” Social Problems ,no. (): . . Emanuel Chill, “Religion and Mendicity in Seventeenth-Century France,” International Review of Social History  (): . .Beier,Masterless Men, ; Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London: Longman, ), –; Paul A. Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, –,” Economic History Review ,no. (): ; Natalie Zemon- Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, ), –, . . Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy,” –. . H. C. M. Michielse,“Policing the Poor: J. L. Vives and the Sixteenth- Century Origins of Modern Social Administration,” Social Service Review  (March ): , , ; Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy, ; Zemon-Davis, Society and Culture, –. . See Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, eds., Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ); Linda

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Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ). .Beier,Masterless Men, . . Ibid., , –, –; Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy,” –. . See Jonathan Barry, ed., The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in English Urban History, – (London: Longman, ). . Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, –. See also Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, – (London: Longman, ); Patricia Fumerton, “Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies ,no. (): –. . For the management of poverty in late antiquity, see Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, ); A. R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). .Beier,Masterless Men, ; Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, –.On charity see Brian Pullan, Poverty and Charity: Europe, Italy and Venice, – (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, ). The seminal work on the redefinition of medieval concepts of poverty is Hans Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic Thought,” Speculum ,no. (): –. . Beier, Masterless Men, –, –. . Ibid., –; C. S. L. Davies,“Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of ,” Economic History Review ,no. (): –; Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy, –. . Chill, “Religion and Mendicity,” ; Jutte, Poverty and Deviance, –; Zemon-Davis, Society and Culture, –; A. L. Beier, “Foucault Redux?: The Role of Humanism, Protestantism, and an Urban Elite in Creating Bridewell, –,” in Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Crimi- nal Prosecutions, ed. Louis A. Knafla, Criminal Justice History  (London: Greenwood, ), –; Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ). . Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, – (Oxford: Clarendon, ), –. . Olwen Hufton, “Begging, Vagrancy, Vagabondage and the Law: An Aspect of the Problem of Poverty in Eighteenth-Century France,” Euro- pean Studies Review , no.  (): –. See also Hal Gladfelder, Crimi- nality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).

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. See Robert M. Schwartz, Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Stuart Woolf, The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Methuen, ). . William Olejniczak,“Working the Body of the Poor: The Atelier de Charité in Late Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Social History , no.  (): –; Hufton, Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, . . Olejniczak, “Body of the Poor,” –, ; Hufton, Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, –. . Hufton, Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, –. . William J. Callahan, “The Problem of Conﬁnement: An Aspect of Poor Relief in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review ,no. (): . . Hufton, “Begging, Vagrancy,” , . . Hufton, Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, . . Callahan, “Conﬁnement,” –. . Ibid., –, . . Eyal Ginio, “Living on the Margins of Charity: Coping with Poverty in an Ottoman Provincial City,” in Bonner, Ener, and Singer, Poverty and Charity, , . . Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government (Lon- don: Longmans, ), ch. . . Nicholas Rogers,“Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century London: The Vagrancy Laws and Their Administration,” Histoire sociale  (May ): . . See Philonauta, The Sailor’s Happiness (London: n.p., ), –, as quoted in Nicholas Rogers, “Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regula- tion of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Slavery and Abolition , no.  (): . . John Donne, “Sermon CLVI Preached to the Virginia Company,” as quoted in Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. , –, ed. Robert H. Bremner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, ), . . Beier, Masterless Men, . . Timothy Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, – (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), –, . . Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas, – (Phoenix Mill, Gloucester- shire: Alan Sutton, ), .

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. Robert C. Johnson,“The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, –,” in Early Stuart Studies, ed. Howard S. Reinmuth Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), , –; see also Barry M. Coldrey, “‘A Place to Which Idle Vagrants May Be Sent’: The First Phase of Child Migration during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Children and Society ,no. (): –. . Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, ), , . . See Peter Wilson Coldham, Child Apprentices in America, from Christ’s Hospital, London, – (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub. Co., ). . Sabine McCormack, “Social Conscience and Social Practice: Poverty and Vagrancy in Spain and Early Colonial Peru,” in Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World, ed. Nicholas Howe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, ), –. . David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History , no.  (): –. For Zanzibar, see ch.  of this volume. . For Cape Colony, see Elizabeth Elbourne, “Freedom at Issue: Va- grancy Legislation and the Meaning of Freedom in Britain and Cape Colony in –,” Slavery and Abolition ,no. (): –;Robert Ross,“‘Rather mental than physical’: Emancipations and the Cape Econ- omy,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth- Century Cape Colony, ed. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, ), –. For Sudan, see Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colo- nial Sudan (Austin: University of Texas Press, ). For Northern Nige- ria, see Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, ), –. For francophone West Africa and the use of vagrancy in a similar way, see Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . McCormack, “Social Conscience,” . . Ann M, Wrightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, –, , –, . . East India Company oﬃcials also used labor and vagrancy laws to wrest control of the labor market from Smith’s invisible hand in eighteenth- century Madras. See Ravi Ahuja,“The Origins of Colonial Labour Policy in Late Eighteenth-Century Madras,” International Review of Social His- tory ,no. (): –.

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. Douglas Lamar Jones,“The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth- Century Massachusetts,”in Walking to Work: Tramps in America, –, ed. Eric Monkkonen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ); Ken Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), ;Jeffrey S. Adler, “A Historical Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy,” Criminology ,no. (): . . Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mex- ico City, – (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), , –, . . Silvia Marina Arrom, Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poor House, – (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . . Ibid., , –, –. . See Jeremy Martens, “Polygamy, Sexual Danger and the Creation of Vagrancy Legislation in Colonial Natal,” Journal of Imperial and Com- monwealth History , no.  (): –. . Robert J. Gordon,“Vagrancy, Law and ‘Shadow Knowledge’: Inter- nal Pacification, –,”in Namibia under South African Rule: Mobil- ity and Containment, –, ed. Patricia Hayes et al. (Oxford: James Currey, ). .Jeffrey S. Adler, “Vagging the Demons and Scoundrels: Vagrancy and the Growth of St. Louis, –,” Journal of Urban History ,no. (): . . Ibid., –. . Kusmer, Down and Out, –. . Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . Ibid., . . Monkkonen, Walking to Work, , . . DePastino, Citizen Hobo, . . See Frank Tobias Higbie, Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, – (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ). . John C. Schneider,“Tramping Workers, –: A Sub-Cultural View,”in Monkkonen, Walking to Work, –. . Lynn Wener,“Sisters of the Road: Women Transients and Tramps,” in Monkkonen, Walking to Work, . . Ibid., –, . . Kusmer, Down and Out, , . . Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Mar- riage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, ), –, –.

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. Ibid., –. . DePastino, Citizen Hobo, –. . Webb and Webb, English Local Government, –. . Robert Humphries, No Fixed Abode: A History of Responses to the Roofless and Rootless in Britain (London: Macmillan, ), . . Lionel Rose, Rogues and Vagabonds: Vagrant Underworld in Britain, – (London: Routledge, ), –. . Ibid., –; Robert Humphries, No Fixed Abode: A History of Re- sponses to the Roofless and Rootless in Britain (London: Macmillan, ), . . Rose, Rogues and Vagabonds, , –; Humphries. No Fixed Abode, . . Timothy Smith, “Assistance and Repression: Rural Exodus, Vagabondage and Social Crisis in France, –,” Journal of Social History ,no. (): –. . Charles Masterman, The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of Prob- lems of Modern City Life in England (London: T. Fisher Unwin, ; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, ), . . Alex de Tocqueville, commenting on Manchester during a five week visit to Britain; quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams Press, ), . . Smith, “Assistance and Repression,” –, –. . John L. Gillin, “Vagrancy and Begging,” American Journal of Soci- ology  (November ): –. Labor colonies were also used in late- nineteenth-century Pernambuco, Brazil. Several labor colonies were conveniently situated next to large sugar estates; even schools for orphan and vagrant children were part of sugar production. The children’s Es- cola Industrial Frei Caneca turned out five thousand kilograms of high- quality sugar each year as well as the facilities to produce rum. Martha K. Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy: Crime and Social Control in the Third World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), , . . Mine Ener, “The Charity of the Khedive,” in Bonner, Ener, and Singer, Poverty and Charity, , . For a more detailed discussion see, Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, – (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ). . Ferdan Ergut, “Policing the Poor in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies , no.  (): –, . . Humphries, No Fixed Abode, –. . DePastino, Citizen Hobo, , Monkkonen, Walking to Work, –. . Kusmer, Down and Out, –. . DePastino, Citizen Hobo, . . Humphries, No Fixed Abode, –.

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. For more detail on these cases and their inﬂuence, see Robin Yea- mans, “Constitutional Attacks on Vagrancy Laws,” Stanford Law Review ,no. (): –. . For the Supreme Court’s decision and Justice Douglas’s opinion on the case see Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville,  U.S.  (); also see Robert C. Ellickson, “Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandling, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning,” Yale Law Journal ,no. (): –. . Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime in the United States, ,”table , http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius/data/table_.html.

 | Paul Ocobock